Pupils were nominated and elected to the proprietary school by shareholders, to be transferred later to the higher school on approval. There they were instructed in the classics, arithmetic, bookkeeping, accounting, etc., and also received a non-sectarian religious education. Non-proprietary pupils paid an entrance fee of one guinea and a quarterly fee of £2/10s. The boys had one week's holiday at Christmas and one month in the summer.

On 27 May 1868 the 180 pupils of the Brighton Grammar School marched in procession to a new, plain, three-storey school building in Buckingham Road. The headmaster from 1861 until 1899 was E.J.Marshall, to whom a plaque has been erected on the adjacent 79 Buckingham Road.

Due to the increasing number of pupils, the Grammar School moved for a second time in September 1913 to a site off Dyke Road then in the parish of Preston Rural; the Buckingham Road building at the corner of Upper Gloucester Road then became the Sussex Maternity Hospital and has now been replaced by a County Council social education centre. The new school, designed by S.B.Russell and known as the Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School, was requisitioned for use as a military hospital soon after it opened in 1914.